• anigbrowl an hour ago

    This would have made for an interesting article, but as a podcast transcript it's virtually unreadable. It also reads like they're talking to children. The Wikipedia article is much better, but too short:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharla_Boehm

    • zimpenfish 2 hours ago
      • bdcravens an hour ago

        For some reason that particular site sticks me into a CAPTCHA loop. (it does work after I open it incognito though, but I still get hit with a CAPTCHA the first time)

        • Imustaskforhelp 23 minutes ago

          https://web.archive.org/web/20260520202425/https://serjaimel...

          Here you go. Hope you enjoy the article, I am gonna go read it too now.

          (PS: I have created htmlpipe and I have written enough about it in submissions/comments etc. so I will hopefully let the project speak for itself now but feel free to ask me any questions as I love to talk and also a minor wish but I hope that more people could use my software but no biggies if they don't as I am happy using it for myself because I built it for myself and to help others! Have a nice day)

      • dijksterhuis 39 minutes ago

        topics like this are why i come to HN

        • readthenotes1 an hour ago

          And married to Barry Boehm of Software Engineering Economics fame. That was one smart couple!

          • firdunupsa2 an hour ago

            See, Scientific American says that a woman’s code underpins the Internet.

            • throwawayk7h an hour ago

              Many people's code underpins the internet. Some of them are women, yes. I wonder if you've ever heard of Grace Hopper.

              • readthenotes1 an hour ago

                And they deadnamed her:(

                • indigodaddy an hour ago

                  Huh?

              • themafia an hour ago

                > If this was 2025, this would be called machine learning because that's really what it was.

                It would be called "machine learning" because that's the buzzword du jour.

                > She was teaching the network to learn how to respond to nodes dropping out.

                That's just called "writing software" not "teaching the network."

                > Machine learning was definitely nonexistent at that point.

                Are you sure about that?

                > And yet, if you look at this 1964 paper, it's kind of unquestionably what it is.

                The document: https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_memoranda/RM3103.html

                The claim: highly questionable.

                The paper is interesting in it's own right, but, to hype it up in this way is gross.

                • kristianp 7 minutes ago

                  > That's just called "writing software" not "teaching the network."

                  I would have expected better from Scientific American. The transcript read as very repetitive.

                  • vasco 3 minutes ago

                    Also if you read Wikipedia it looks like the main contribution was a simulator.

                  • CharlesW 2 hours ago

                    TLDR: Sharla Boehm helped invent packet switching, a.k.a. "hot potato routing", and wrote the first implementation which proved that it could work. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharla_Boehm

                    • jagged-chisel 2 hours ago

                      [And/But] whose code is [/not] present in today’s packet routing code

                      Do we know which?

                      • readthenotes1 an hour ago

                        Since it was a simulation written in Fortran, the odds of it actually being used for routing is pretty small.

                        • cmiles74 an hour ago

                          I bet someone read the paper she co-authored and that might have had some influence on the code that they ended up writing. Her husband worked on ARPAnet, surely he would have mentioned that paper to someone!